The DRUSSA.net site remains live as a publicly accessible resource. There is a wealth of programme-derived knowledge, tools, and resources that university leaders, research staff and research uptake managers should continue to be able to access and use as they strengthen their university management systems for getting research into use.

There is another, new public access location for the DRUSSA Learning Resource . The Association of Commonwealth Universities has developed the Learning Resource to serve as the long-term home research uptake resources and other literature and tools for research uptake you may find useful.

The Learning Resource is housed on the ACU website and it re-curates a selection of 160 documents from DRUSSA.net that can be utilised as training aids, tools and resources in strengthening research uptake systems going forward, and will also be supplemented with new resources under development – such as online research uptake guides and new literature in the field.

DRUSSA.net has been the digital hub for twenty two developmentally oriented universities in twelve countries in sub-Saharan Africa. All but one of the programme’s collaborating partners are located in sub-Saharan Africa too. CREST [live link] at the University of Stellenbosch will continue to offer the Research Uptake and Impact specialism in it M. Phil in Science and Technology Studies. OSD [live link] has taken the Communication and Engagement role and has been both a learning resource and a learner in this role. The ACU, in addition to co-ordinating the organizational change initiatives chosen by each university and the demand-side pilot in Uganda and Ghana that has linked users of research evidence with producers of research evidence, has been the accountable grantholder and liaison with the funder, UKAID in the UK. The programme is featured in the UK government’s DevTracker [live link] devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-1-202004/

The series of three structured and mentored Research Uptake Communications (RUC) training activities run by DRUSSA partner Organisation Systems Design over a five-year period for the DRUSSA programme culminated with a sense of a positive onward journey. A fitting place to begin a retrospective look at the RUC Campaigns is the 6 April 2016, the day fifty-three RUC course participants gathered in one room in Johannesburg, South Africa as part of the face-to-face element of the RUC2016 activity. It was a rare opportunity for this RUC community, who have networked digitally and only met at one previous event, to be in the same physical location.

How research is undertaken, made available, accessed, applied and used is at the heart of Research Uptake. In order to address a range of developmental challenges research needs to be disseminated outside the academic domain to meet policy- and decision-makers needs for reliable evidence from science, technology and social science research. The DRUSSA programme piloted an approach to support capacity building for government staff to access and use research evidence. The purpose is to have university researchers and ministry advisors better understand and appreciate how and when research evidence can inform policy decision-making.

Case studies have been produced from the DRUSSA- sponsored MPhil graduates’ dissertations and from research undertaken by the DRUSSA programme team. All of the case studies provide current insights into different aspects of Research Uptake in sub-Saharan Africa.

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